Manufacturers and other suppliers need to have a sufficient understanding of consumers' desires and requirements to ensure that the products manufactured or sold are successful in the market place. However, it has become increasingly impractical and increasingly difficult to have first hand knowledge about consumer preferences, as the size of manufacturing/supply organizations and consumer populations have grown. Yet, every marketer yearns to know the motivation behind consumers' decisions to purchase certain goods and services. To fill this need, the science, art, and business of marketing research has replaced first hand experience as the link between manufacturer, retailer, businessmen and their customers. The marketing industry has developed various marketing research techniques to obtain this knowledge as accurately as possible. These techniques range from the analysis of actual sales and shipment data to various methods of surveying consumers. The latter techniques include door-to-door interviews, telephone interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, and similar forms of surveys.
However, these techniques have significant problems relating to the underlying statistical principles, human nature, etc. For instance, it is well known that people's answers to why they buy in surveys are often inaccurate and useless. Direct questioning rarely unveils the genuine motives of buyers. Focus groups face the problems of the dominant individual, and the general tendency of many people to simply please others. Ranking surveys encounter the problem of reluctance to select either extreme of the measurement scale. Random selection produces the statistical problem of establishing the population frame of interest. While surveys of the general population, represented by the typical random sample, provide useful data, the views and preferences of the segment of the population that is seriously considering the purchase of a particular product prove to be that much more useful. The prior art provides no reliable cost effective methods to establish such a desired population. Subdividing the surveyed sample by answer to the question “are you at this time seriously considering a purchase” raises the statistical problem of skewing the population frame and thereby compromising the statistical soundness of the results. Accordingly, marketing researchers would find it invaluable to have the ability to map the considerations of consumers as they are forming their product or service purchase decisions.
Just as manufacturers and suppliers face the task of understanding consumer preferences, consumers face the task of obtaining sufficient information about many products when trying to make an informed buying decision. The task becomes most difficult when the product of interest falls into a class of products having considerable financial consequences, such as automobiles, that are expensive, complex with respect to product features, and numerous with respect to various options. Each consumer attaches different importance levels to different parameters or criteria of a product. For example, the parameters/criteria of automobiles include price range, legroom, trunk capacity, etc., with each having a different level of importance to each consumer. In considering laptop computers, some consumers find weight to be the most important factor while others focus on performance, screen size, etc. In choosing vacation resorts or hotels, some consumers find beachfront location to be the most important factor while others find it crucial to have on-the-premises entertainment, family-friendly environment, secluded location, etc. Even after investing a considerable amount of time obtaining information from various sources, the consumer is still left wondering whether he/she has missed other possible products or services. Consumers find it difficult to compare services or products because the information is typically spread amongst a number of sources. A product leaflet or a web site on a particular model laptop personal computer may list screen size but not weight. Automobile product information may list horsepower but not acceleration time or braking distance.
Advertisers consider targeted, rather than broadcast, advertisements to be highly desirable. Advertisers of computers and computer-related equipment place their ads in computer magazines; hotel and resort ads appear in travel magazines and travel sections of newspapers. Advertisers on television generally target their advertisements to programs appropriate for the desired customer base. Advertisers using the World Wide Web face a problem in targeting their advertising, since the interest profile of a user accessing a web site is not known, as it may be in the case of a magazine.
Several patents have attempted to address this problem, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,061 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,026,368. These methods depend on setting a “cookie” on the user's disk, that is writing information to the user's disk recording the user's actions in accessing the web, a practice that has privacy implications. In addition to privacy concerns, users can disable “cookies”, or delete them from their drives, thereby compromising these approaches to targeted advertising.